An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
sharp. The door was opened by his elder daughter Lilian. She told me that her father was unwell. I learned a few hours later that he had died in the night. Her calm stoicism was extraordinary.
David Hayden. September 1958. It was said that his parents, coach tour operators, never got over the loss of their beefy son whose brother had already died. Alan Moss, elder brother of my contemporary Melodie, was injured and hospitalised. Car crash near Tilshead on Salisbury Plain.
Richard Sturdy. April 1959. He and his father, a Wareham vet, were drowned when their skiff capsized in Poole Harbour. I heard from a friend whom I had run into outside Beach’s bookshop, my de facto alma mater; most of the staff had been taught by my mother and were happy to let me sit on the floor reading for hours on end without pressing me to buy anything.
Seven years earlier, in February 1952, I had been on the very same spot with my mother when she noticed the lowered flag above the Close Gate and realised that King George VI had died. We were on our way to The House of Steps a few yards away. My first act as a New Elizabethan was to eat hot buttered crumpets in that most sinisterly named tea-rooms from whose owner my parents bought my first bicycle when his son Peter Rothwell had outgrown it: a maroon BSA with a curved crossbar, an American design made under licence.
Spiller and Sturdy were my fellow pupils though I hardly knew them. David Hayden was seven years my senior. I have no idea how I met him. But at the age of eleven my aptitude for indiscriminate acquaintanceship was already coming along hummingly.
Since my parents had improbably heard of any one of them during their life I didn’t bother to familiarise them with them now dead. My silence, in these instances, was guiltless.
It was not always so.
A. Hand & Son (groceries, provisions, post office) stood on the corner of Ayleswade Road, Harnham Road and St Nicholas Road, at whose southern end two bridges cross branches of the Avon: the houses between the bridges were often flooded and A. Hand was not immune. As the handle of a high-geared Berkel bacon slicer was turned ponderously the blade rotated at twenty times the speed in an enticingly lethal blur which prompted me to tuck my scrotum between my legs. A spiral staircase rose to a storeroom, and a wooden ladder, smooth as a shove-ha’penny coin, to the highest shelves whose glass-fronted compartments held cotton reels, Kirby grips, pins, needles, decorative combs, Germolene and lint. A wire-mesh screen signified the post office area.
Period product inventory. Hairy cardboard boxes; hairy Izal toilet paper; Weston’s Wagon Wheels; Nestlé’s segmental chocolate bars with green mint filling and green wrappers, Fry’s segmental chocolate bars with white mint filling and navy wrappers; Fry’s Turkish Delight; Crosse & Blackwell Russian Salad; Trex; Robinsons Lemon Barley Water; Kia-Ora (which meant good health – it was everyone’s single word of Maori); Walls’ disgusting pork sausages; Millers’ even more disgusting pork pies; Smiths Crisps (which often weren’t); parlously balanced displays of Daz, Omo, Persil; Weetabix, Grape-Nuts (for the cleaner colon), Welgar Shredded Wheat from Welwyn Garden City (the name suggested a corner of paradise); Keillers butterscotch; individual fruit pies; Lyle’s Golden Syrup (Out of the strong came forth sweetness); packet soups; tinned soups, fruit salad and cling peaches; bottled sauces – A.1., HP, OK, Daddies, Heinz Salad Cream and ketchup; cut flowers in dank water according to season; glass jars of Black Jacks, bullseyes, aniseed balls, licorice allsorts and shrill boiled sweets; scrubbing brushes; Oxo and Bovril; Rowntree’s Fruit Gums (which caused mouth ulcers) and Fruit Pastilles (which didn’t); baskets of wasp-bored apples and blighted vegetables; towers of biscuits; Camp Coffee; Shipham’s Paste; Sandwich Spread; Sun-Pat peanut butter (smooth – crunchy was still far in the future); Energen rolls and Dutch rusks; red Edam, mousetrap henges, St Ivel lactic cheese and Dairylea; Nestlé condensed milk (sweetened for instant sick), Ideal Milk (evaporated); Spangles and Refreshers; stacks of the Salisbury Journal, the Salisbury Times, Harnham Parish Magazine.
Dun split peas in burlap sacks seemed hopelessly old-fashioned among the gaudily packaged products of the first age of food colouring.
By the summer of 1956 an up-to-the-minute freezer had been wedged into a corner beside the slicer and window display to store ice cream, Koola Frutas, Mivvis, Birds Eye fish fingers, Findus fish cakes, Ross peeled prawns and fish and chips in a box designed to resemble crumpled newspaper – a Mudd Pack by H. Mudd & Sons of Grimsby. All this and much more was contained in a shop hardly larger than the combined front and dining rooms of the houses in the adjacent terrace. Mr Hand (cleaner-shaven than his wife, wirewool hair en brosse) had two assistants: the severe, bespectacled Mr Weston (grocer’s stripes) and the chummy one (grocer’s stripes). They wore long tan warehouse coats. They edged nimbly through canyons of boxes. They clambered daintily over teetering crates. Customers were less practised in negotiating the multiple obstacles. When more than eight people were in the store things went tumbling because of the squash. Everyone was so close you smelled your ripe neighbour. No gossipy whisper went unheard.
Midday, early September 1956. I was waiting in the bunched queue to be served from the freezer when a woman in a pacamac squeezed into the shop, causing the bell on a spring to ring. There was the usual murmur of ‘Good morning or [polite laughter] is it afternoon already?’ The pacamac took her place at the back of the queue. And that would have been that had she not espied the fat-arsed woman in front of me. She busied through. She spoke in hush-voice to her friend’s ear.
‘Did you hear … terrible … Dr Laing’s little boy … they don’t know if he was thrown off … fell he could have fell … he fell on his head … his own pony … brand-new … he had one of those hats on cap things but … in the field behind their house … where the barn is … the ambulance took him up Odstock … too late they said … nothing they could do to save the little mite nothing … didn’t regain you know … died in the theatre …’fn1
She wasn’t as hugger-mugger as she believed.
The shop fell silent.
Thus I learnt that Jeremy Laing had been killed. He was my first friend to die. I thought of his nice wise face and his thick round glasses and his quizzical earnestness and the strain of mockery he got from his father. I dawdled home with my lolly – now somehow shameful, undeserved.
There were, as usual, the gusts of stinging sourness from Hawk Bowns’s dairy, of scorched horn from Curtis’s smithy. I loitered outside Sid the Butcher’s shop: unburdened by horrible knowledge he was, as usual, sawing and gabbing. Sid the Butcher’s bicycle’s rear wheel’s translucent plastic veil to protect his mac from spray that escaped the mudguard was, as usual, crazed and engrimed. Mr Thick the Drowner grunted, as usual, through his abundantly encrusted moustache. The wicket fence that supported his arthritic bones was, as usual, rotten and miraculously vertical. Ian Horn’s parents’ front garden was, as usual, full of axles, tarpaulins and buckets. The Lovely Queenie’s rouge was, as usual, like a scary clown’s. The russet fur round the collar of her peplum’d serge jacket was, as usual, thick as a bush. Iridescent feathers glinted, as usual, in her hat. She greeted me, as usual, with her blowsy cackle and her former-barmaid-trying-but-failing-to-make-comeback leer. Even though it was a minute further from her house than the R & C, The Lovely Queenie was, as usual, off to The Swan for her lunchtime noggin. Old Street’s ragged metalled surface was succeeded, as usual, by muddy gravel, cinders and puddles. The alley off it that was also a drain flowed with foul leucous liquid, as usual. In the small square of reeking rookeries it led to the pye-dogs howled, as usual.
This was all wrong.
Someone had ceased to exist in the form he had enjoyed till earlier that morning, had stopped being a person, had made a monumental shift into a state that wasn’t a state.
Yet this routine itinerary’s stages, scents and personae had not changed. Nor had the way I perceived them changed. There was no revealed acknowledgment that he was dead. What did I expect? Wilting flowers? The collapse of Mr Thick’s fence? A shocking fact was hidden in my head. That it had no effect on the exterior world signified that world’s heartlessness. I tried to calculate where Jeremy was now, what he was now. Was he a void? And was a void like a vacuum? Probably. Where he had been there was nothing – but where was this freshly created nothingness